Irshad Manji: ‘Moderate’ Muslims part of the problem

After the 2005 London transit bombings, I delivered a radio commentary disagreeing with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the moderate American imam who later fronted the campaign for an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero. He had issued a statement about the London terror strikes, assuring journalists that according to the Quran, “Whoever kills a human being … it is as if he has killed all humankind.”

“Not quite,” I explained with regret. “The full verse reads, ‘Whoever kills a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be regarded as having killed all humankind'” (my emphasis). For the British jihadis, I went on, “villainy in the land” describes the boot prints of U.S. soldiers in Iraqi soil. This otherwise humane Quranic passage gives aspiring holy warriors a loophole to exploit.

[…] Here is a clue to who’s who: Moderate Muslims denounce violence committed in the name of Islam but insist that religion has nothing to do with it; reformist Muslims, by contrast, not only deplore Islamist violence but admit that our religion is used to incite it.